How to change part quantity in a Bill of Material without editing the Drawing BOM

During a support call, this question came up. The customer stated, "My assembly has a total of 75 wire ties. I only have 1 part file inserted in my assembly but I want to show 75 as a quantity in my Bill of Material. How can I do this?" 

There are 3 ways that I can think of off the top of my head. Pick and choose which one is the best solution for you unless you have one of your own:

One way is to edit the quantity cell for that part in the drawing Bill of Material and overwrite the value. Another solution would be to pattern the part 75 times and suppress the pattern in the Feature Manager Tree. This would also show 75 as a quantity for the wire ties.  A third way is to use the File > Properties portion of the part itself. 

In this illustration, I am using a part file called Basic. I opened up the File>Properties of this part. The following property window appears.   I added a Property Name called "Quantity". I also made the TYPE a Number.  Once the Property named "Quantity" was added, I was able to link that property to the BOM quantity box. I updated the "Value/Text Expression" box to show the desired quantity of 75. 

Once the property box is completed, click OK.

Next, I created a Bill of Material for my Basic part. The quantity entered as a property is now visible in the QTY column of the Bill of Material. Mission Accomplished!

I hope any of these 3 solutions is useful to you.  Feel free to share some of your own ideas!

Judy Marlo

Application Engineer

Computer Aided Technology Inc.